Nostalgia – FROM THE SHOE

“And Mom and Dad Were Still Here…”

I was cleaning over the weekend, and what inevitably happens, happened. I found an old camera. I fired it up and checked out the old pics that were in it, some from last year and some even further back. I found this one. I knew I didn’t take it, but thought maybe Eugene did. I posted it on the Russian River Memories Facebook page where my brother, Mike, remembered the photo and took the credit. A beautiful picture, a beautiful memory from late August 2017. My brother commented, “August 24, 2017, before the fire…and Mom and Dad were still here.” That was all it took for the wave to hit.

“Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow…“

Ahhh, September…a time to remember. And, boy, this photo and that comment had me hurling back like in a time machine movie to a time when my parents were alive. Hurling back to the last licks of summer at the river – splashing, swimming or sitting in the sun – either when I was a kid or when I had kids, “…and Mom and Dad were still here.” The two people who walked the farthest with me on this earthly journey. (Mary might beat them though.) I miss them. I even miss my dad…as curmudgeonly as he was. I certainly miss him during football season.

Ironically, as I was recently watching videos of the tragedy of September 11th, I was telling one of my daughters about it. Then I realized, she hadn’t even been born yet. And the others were so young. Between the two instances, the above photo with my brother’s heart-wrenching comment and the conversation about 9/11, I felt like I was on this cosmic boundary (kinda like Janus) remembering people who are no longer here, and realizing the people I live with were not alive just 23 years ago. Am I making sense?

In 2017, when the photo was taken, my parents were “still here” and all my children had been born as well as three of my grand-kids. There are three more grand-kids who didn’t get to meet them. New people. New personalities. Descendants.

I am an autumn person, and reminiscing and remembering, (while listening to sad folks songs) is my cup of tea, I excel at it. I could get lost in the memories. Childhood, teenage years, young adulthood and the long journey of marriage and child rearing…all of which are in the rear view mirror now. Yikes! What a long, strange trip it’s been!

Now all these new people…little people, rough and tumble and rambunctious little boys and cute and coy and captivating little girls. Boy, how did I manage to raise ten??

As much as I long to linger in the past and remember when “Mom and Dad were still here”, I need to look forward and dive into the future positively, even eagerly, for these fun little people that the Lord has put in my life. And there may be more…LOL.

So how do I turn this around? How do I use autumn and this chronic habit of nostalgia as a fertile soil for future memories with these new little people and even with my own adult kids? How do I wrench my backward looking gaze to a future looking vision?

It’s a little scary to look forward now because those days are numbered, and I’m far enough through the tunnel to begin to see some light. And I am tempted to despair or be fearful about that…but I remember something, or Someone else. Someone who traveled with me even when I was “being knit in my mother’s womb.” Who continues to travel with me, and Who I will be with in eternity. “In my Father’s house, there are many abiding places…” John 14:2.

I think being nostalgic is safe for me. I’m safe in those memories because I lived them and survived them. If I look forward, especially now that my kids are grown and my parents are gone, there are no road markers. I’m in uncharted territory. Unmoored, untethered and unseen. But again…Isaiah writes, “I will lead the blind on a way they do not know; by paths they do not know I will guide them. I will turn darkness into light before them, and make crooked ways straight. These are my promises: I made them, I will not forsake them.”

My immediate and eternal future is safe in His hands, He will guide me. He promised! And I pray He will help me knit myself into the lives of those little people and those ones who used to be little while “I am still here.” And perhaps, I can knit some of my love of the Savior into all of their lives as well.

“The Christmas Express”

Hop into the holiday season with this quaint, family-friendly live performance at the Bay Church, Concord.

What’s not to love about a local holiday theater production? “The Christmas Express” written by Pat Cook and performed by the Performing Arts Ministry of the Bay Church in Concord whistles with nostalgia, humor, profundity and a mixed-up bag of memorable characters.

The old train station in Holly had seen better days. Station Master Hilda still pines for the old days while grumbling in the present. Her assistant, Satch, is no help to cheer her up. Homespun characters make their way to the station and try to brighten up the season. It’s not until a mysterious stranger appears from a mysterious train and proceeds to transform the station and the town.

Friday night’s performance was just what the doctor ordered for local, entertaining holiday fare. The comic cues were on point, the characters were well developed, and the staging and costumes contributed to the nostalgic feel of the story. A young audience member exclaimed, “I liked it. It was funny!” Rick Kerns noted, “Great expressions, the cast was extraordinary!”

Come and see for yourself! Start out your holiday season on “The Christmas Express”.

Two more performances next week, Thursday and Friday, November 11 and 12, 7:30 PM curtain time, 4725 Evora Road, Concord.

“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!”

Frolicking in the Autumn Mist

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Every year it seems, I write a blog about autumn. Last year I wrote The Warmth of the Sun, the year before, The Intimations of Autumn, and others that include Autumn Days are the Best, Autumn and Joe Montana and Delicious Autumn! My Soul is Wedded to it. There may be others as well. Evidently, I love autumn. What is it about this season that produces such nostalgia, such longing, such remembrance of things past?

Monday I was in a kinda funk. So to feel better, I played around on my phone, checking out social media. I posted some of my favorite pictures, and updated one of the aforementioned autumn themed blogs. Still feeling a little out-of-sorts, maybe I was looking for “my own spot to stand,” to quasi-quote Jim Weatherley lyrics. I stumbled on some very cool Autumn themed Facebook pages, joined a few and was greeted by other fall-a-philes.

Finding these pages reminded me of my love for this season and some of my favorite memories. As I frolicked, like Puff, in this kind of autumn mist of misty-colored memories of the far past, my out-of-sorts sorted itself out. When I reconnected with things I loved and others that loved them too, I got re-grounded. There’s more than just memories here.

I consider myself in the autumn time of my life, being past 50. And as I age, I appreciate this season more and more. I know my autumns are numbered, as all of ours are, and I’m determined to extract all the joy and pleasure I can from its colors, its celebrations, its sensations, its weather and its memories. True pleasures are few and far between.

However, C.S. Lewis said something interesting in The Weight of Glory, when speaking of a universal sense of elusive longing, a longing which appears to be related to nostalgia, but not necessarily so:

We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter.

Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.

These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire….For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

I believe this is what autumn does to me…those good memories I have are really like beautiful phantoms. If I went back to those days, granted many joyful moments remain, but the beauty that Mr. Lewis speaks of, the longing, the saudades according to the Portuguese, sehnsucht to the Germans, is elusive; it is a reminder and longing for something else. It’s the thing I long for when I look for a home. Mr. Lewis continues:

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is a bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become a part of it…

For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy.

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in.

In the meantime, and during my remaining autumns, I will frolick in the autumn mist of my happy childhood memories of Santa Rosa, my summers at the Russian River. I will remember school, mud football, Halloween, Thanksgivings and Christmases with my grandmother. The old memories. I will also remember, misty-eyed, the lean Christmases with my babies, listening to Evie’s Come On, Ring Those Bells while decorating the house and making homemade Christmas presents. Running around now with four grandchildren, I have NO IDEA how I managed to tend to ten kids. Grace abounding, glory to God….seriously.

And as I remember, I understand swirling about those memories are gleanings of a far away country, a place where He is preparing for me an eternal abiding place. Something wonderful this way comes….

Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no more sea. Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.”

Then He who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Revelation 21:1-5

Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

C.S. Lewis – The Weight of Glory